Our Present Burden

2005-01-16 at 7:32 p.m.

I am sitting listening to the Beautiful South's "Golddiggas, Headnodders & Pholk Songs" which I got the other day. Not sure I like it - in case you've not heard of it, its an album of cover songs done with rather different music. For instance they've done Don't Fear the Reaper and You're the One That I Want considerably differently to the originals. Its a bit strange.

Hmmm, anyway. I've been doing not very much today. Had sunday lunch which was not all that nice as the vegetables were underdone (and I like veggies). Then I went to the pub and read a book called Guppies for Tea which was not very good, a sort of inferior version of Rose Tremain.

I should really be revising for my biology test, but as I've discovered many times before, the more I revise a subject, the worse I do at it. I think I must have a perverse mind or something. I did best at university in the subjects I a) did not understand b) did not revise and/or c) was not present for the lectures. Very odd.

In other news, I wrote a new poem last night, which I am moderately pleased with, though I seem to have come over strangely political:

Our Present Burden

The benevolent paternalists, last remnants
of the white man's burden,
lie numbered among the dead of 9/11.
Their death goes unmourned save
for some who hold that paternalism -
though insulting in the extreme -
was at least better than overt racism,
to the fear of the brown man under the bed.
Now we list our hate in columns of righteous anger:
headscarves, veils, checkered head-dresses,
foreign names and dusky skin.
Above all we newly hate our old compatriot,
the religion we once admired -
now seen as irredeemably tainted and vile.
No more shall the Western mountain
come to Mohammed and learn (or teach)
now we revise our knowledge to exclude
all that our fellow People of the Book have done.
We tie the religion to the race -
surely no Arab can disbelieve in Allah,
no man from the Middle East be other
than a fanatical adherent of that creed.
They cannot be liberal, as even the most right-wing
declare themselves to be.
Now we speak from hate where once,
once we spoke from patronising fondness:
all this without passing through respect.
The paternalist occidental vision perished,
died as the Twin Towers fell -
and rose reborn as fearful frothing racists,
too righteous to behold themselves as who they are.
Now is the dawn of the white man's paranoia.

And in yet more news, I have definitely decided to create a new website, to be called Starless Country, and which I'm trying to decide on the design for at the moment.

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